Chapter Three

Waiting for the Foal

AS SOON AS I ENTERED the feed room that morning I knew the foal had been born, because I could hear the stall gate being rattled, and the mare never did that. It was May 19, 1997, and although the foal had been due at the end of April, the spring had been cold, and a mare can prevent the birth until her instincts tell her the weather is favorable.

Because new horse mothers are fiercely protective and will not tolerate dogs or other horses—even stable mates—near their young for several weeks after the birth, I left my dog, Colleen, in the feed room and hurried downstairs with the mare’s grain. There on the straw lay the foal, kicking the gate. My other mare and pony gelding stood watching at the far end of the barn, separated from the foaling stall by two gates. Even Soxie, the barn cat, kept her distance, perched on a rafter, but curious nevertheless.

The foal was palomino-tan with a white blaze, black mane and forelegs, and white tail and hind legs, an unusual coloring that I knew it would not retain since almost all foals change color during their early months or years.

The mare nickered to me. When I petted and praised her for her accomplishment, she lowered her head to be stroked; in my experience, all new equine mothers do this, perhaps wanting sympathy for what they have gone through to give me this prize. Equine labor is shorter than women’s but more violent. In addition, although delivery is usually less complicated than it is for women, mares have more difficulty carrying the infant to maturity.

My mare was a black Thoroughbred, once a race horse, and, judging from her papers, a successful one. She had been a sprinter—one whose races were mostly under a mile—and had won over two hundred fifty thousand dollars during her career—considerable for the late 1980s. Her neck still bore the semicircular scar of an operation to open her windpipe. Her registered name was Wee Salmon, but I called her Xanadu. The foal’s sire, a dapple gray Connemara named Prospect’s Callahan, lived on a breeding farm about thirty miles south in Knox County.

I knelt to run my hands over the foal’s back and neck. Hoping for a filly, I felt beneath the stump of a tail. No vulva. It was a colt.

The surest cure for disappointment, however, is activity. I fed the other horses to keep them busy while I worked with the foal, kneeling over him and running my hands over all parts of his body, keeping my head well away from his since newborn foals throw their heads up involuntarily. I also anointed his umbilical cord and the bottoms of his hooves with iodine to prevent infection.

Imprinting is the process of handling the foal in order to prepare it to accept human beings. I inserted my fingers into the back of his mouth to simulate a bit, held him around his barrel tightly where a girth will go, and clapped my hands against all four of his hooves to acquaint him with the farrier’s trimming and pounding. He did not accept all this attention willingly but struggled against each procedure, at one point even throwing me against the wall and overturning the water bucket. By noon my overalls were soaked and covered with dirt. We went through the entire process eight times with me persisting until his expression changed. I also groomed him, fitted the halter on, and taught him to lead, turn, back, and lift one foot at a time. Part of their training involves acquainting foals with noise so that they will not shy at scary but harmless sounds such as those they might encounter at fairs, horse shows, or race tracks, so I clanged the water buckets together and pounded on the aluminum stall gate with a hammer.

A foal’s arrival means a busy day. First I found the placenta for the veterinarian to examine for abnormalities and then forked the straw out of the foaling stall. Foals should be born on straw because it is cleaner than sawdust, but after the birth, any bedding can be used. The mare, too, needed to be cleaned. She showed me her affection as she usually does, by putting her head against my chest.

As I spread the straw from the foaling stall onto the strawberry patch I noticed that another mother had triumphed that morning: three killdeer eggs laid in the vegetable garden on May 7 hatched overnight. Earlier, while I plowed, the killdeer mother stood her ground, shrieking at me and pounding her wings whenever I came near. She never abandoned her eggs, however, and I marked the nest with a surveyor’s flag.

A killdeer mother—I don’t know whether it is the same one—lays eggs every year, in the garden, in the strawberry patch, or on the gravel driveway because the camouflage is so good. Whenever I hear the killdeer’s shriek or see the slender, long-legged, energetic brown bird with white breast and black neck rings, I search out the nest and mark the location to avoid stepping on the eggs. Killdeer young fly immediately after hatching. In this they are like foals, who must get up and learn the use of their legs at once in order to survive.

Because the stallion was dapple gray, I guessed that the colt would become gray as he aged, so I decided to name him Callahan’s Grayfell for his father and for the horse in Robinson Jeffers’s narrative poem At the Birth of an Age. I guessed wrong: Grayfell stayed palomino-tan for two years and then turned dark bay, more like his mother than his father, although he inherited his sire’s striking white blaze and distinctive white legs.

After I had imprinted Grayfell several times, I let him return to his mother and opened the gate to allow them both to walk outside into the paddock. Some of the best moments are those when a foal first leaves the barn and sees how large the world is. Just yesterday he existed only as his mother’s second heartbeat. Now he was part of the environment we all share—the emerald-green spring grass, the hills, the blue sky.

On the second day of Grayfell’s life, I turned him and Xanadu out into the pasture and watched him running for the first time. In the afternoon, when I brought them back in, we walked around some boards nailed to posts near the barn, which I suspect were once part of a cattle chute, loading bank, or corral. Grayfell, not knowing how to go around, and alarmed that his mother was walking away from him, leaped the two-foot obstacle—impressive for a colt only two days old.

I continued the imprinting process multiple times each day for a week and all summer worked with him for about fifteen minutes several times a day. Foals, like children, have short attention spans and easily become bored with any one task. He was a tough one, more stubborn and willful than any other foal I had ever handled. I began to wonder whether I had taken on more than I could deal with and regretted breeding him in the first place. As the days passed, however, he began to establish his place in the barn and became a personality and presence on the farm. He would be a challenge, but I would learn from him.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by how much one has to know in order to keep horses. The best material for stall floors is a layer of gravel underneath packed clay which can be covered with straw bedding. Oat straw is sometimes difficult to obtain, since soybeans and corn bring higher profits to farmers. Moldy straw, furthermore, can adversely affect a horse’s respiratory tract. Wood shavings are the bedding of choice for those with plenty of money. Sawdust is less expensive and easier to handle, but it’s not as clean or safe: sawdust made from walnut or cherry trees can cause horses to founder, so it is necessary for the buyer to know what kinds of trees the lumber mill uses. My barn has a concrete floor because it originally housed cattle, sheep, and hogs, but bare concrete draws moisture from horse hooves, so I placed rubber mats on the floor and covered them with sawdust made from locust trees. Eventually a layer packed down by horse hooves provided a cushion for the dry bedding which I rake on top. This method seems to work as the stalls stay dry and the horses’ feet are in good shape. I enjoy raking sawdust, smoothing it out so that the bedding lies evenly. The work provides an opportunity to meditate while I listen to the swallows in spring and summer, sparrows in autumn and winter.

Owners can’t just turn horses out into a pasture but need to know what kinds of grass they are eating. Lush early growth will fatten them up but can also cause laminitis, which often leads to the chronic, debilitating hoof condition called founder, so horses usually cannot be turned out all day in the spring. The new grasses of April and May change in their mineral composition, so the horses have to be allowed to readapt after a few weeks. My pasture is not lush but contains a good deal of sedge grass and clover, which horses do not like. I do not reseed or fertilize the acreage because of the danger of laminitis and because, in spite of the lack of choice grasses, my horses stay fatter than I want them to be.

Horses that are ridden or worked and those with bad feet require shoes, and all horses, even if they have good feet, have to be trimmed, so it is necessary to find a good farrier. People have asked me why domesticated horses need shoes when wild horses do not. The answer is that truly wild horses were small, and their hooves, which grow constantly, were trimmed by continued walking or running over stony or hard ground as they foraged; domesticated horses are much larger and kept in pastures where the earth is mostly too soft to wear their hooves down. Wild horses that escaped from domestication, such as the population in the American West, do not live as long as tame horses and often go lame because of hoof problems. Formerly, as they aged they were picked off by mountain lions and timber wolves, but more recently with the extirpation of predators, they die of starvation since they cannot migrate to new pastures. Most importantly, the horse as we know it has been much changed by human breeding to create a large, athletic animal as unlike its Asian predecessor as the house dog is to the wild dogs of the Eurasian steppes. While many domesticated horses retain the hardiness of their ancestors, many do not—particularly the most finely bred of them all, the Thoroughbred. Many people consider the Thoroughbred to be the most beautiful of all horse breeds, and many are highly intelligent—but they are bred for speed and athleticism while all else is ignored, including temperament and good feet. My mare Xanadu had a fine, placid temperament but the worst feet of any horse I have ever owned, and she was constantly throwing shoes and injuring the pads. Because she raced for an unusually long time, she also developed arthritis earlier than most sport horses do and in her later years became less and less willing to jump or work on the flat. Although I loved her, I will never have another horse with bad feet.

The teeth of domesticated horses need to be filed, or “floated,” once a year, due to uneven growth of the surfaces after maturity. A gland in the jowls secretes fluid that cleans the teeth, while grinding grass keeps them level. Horses kept continuously in stalls develop uneven teeth because they never chew their natural food—grass—but instead are fed hay and grain, which are somewhat abrasive. My horses spend twelve to twenty-four hours in the pasture during summer and fall, so their teeth are in good shape. The mare Kestrel lived to be thirty-five, and Xanadu lived to be thirty-one. Decades ago, twenty years was considered old age for a horse, but now many can be active far into their twenties due to the senior equine feeds that have been developed. Wild horses would die of starvation before reaching half the age of well-cared-for domesticated equines.

In 1998, at the annual Horse Progress Days event held in Holmes County, I learned that many farmers have returned to plowing with horses for several reasons: the outlay of capital is smaller than the cost of machinery, they can farm smaller and hillier fields with horses, and there is less risk of injury than with tractors. Using horses for timber-cutting damages the forest floor far less than using heavy machinery.

One farmer claimed that his team of Belgian draft horses could plow a field as quickly as it took another farmer to plow with a tractor, that harnessing and caring for horses took no more time than maintaining machinery, and that using horses was more enjoyable: while working, he listened to birdsong and wind, whereas the farmer on the tractor listened all day to the metallic groan of the internal-combustion engine. A young man raised by countercultural parents who later started a tree nursery farmed his own land with horses in the Maryland hills. Returning to horse-drawn equipment for farming and timbering may be part of the solution to carbon emissions.

I first loved horses (not a conscious decision, as most of our likes and dislikes are not) when I watched two large bay farm horses grazing in a pasture near where my cousins lived in Jefferson County. An aunt and uncle rented a rambling old country house, and when visiting them, we went often to the neighbor’s farm to watch the animals. I do not know whether it was their intelligent faces, graceful necks, or sheer impressive size, but I spent a long time talking to them and decided, of all farm animals, I liked horses best, although I loved my puppy and my cat. It was the beginning of a lifelong infatuation. I was destined to become a “horse nut.” I am not sure why horse people are thought to be so eccentric while those who devote themselves to tennis, golf, skiing, or cycling are not. Perhaps the unusual zeal ascribed to equestrians is that horse sports are some of the few avocations that require a living partner whose needs are more imminent than the care lavished on sports equipment. Of course, there are aficionados of other animals—dogs, cats, cattle, goats, sheep, racing pigeons—but in no other case do person and animal form a working unit. I love the creak of saddle leather, the sway of a horse’s back at the walk or canter, and contact with its mouth through the reins; when I ride I feel that I am part of the horse, more closely connected to the natural world than I am even when I walk. I like driving a tractor, but doing so does not give me the same feeling as riding a horse.

The reason so many women participate in horse sports is that a man on a horse has no advantage over a woman on a horse. Riders do not control horses but harness their energy by working in partnership with them, and women have always had to work in partnership. Except for the tradition of ladies’ harness classes, there are no separate divisions for women and men in horse shows as there are in almost all other sports. Women have competed equally with men in all types of riding after abandoning the sidesaddle, and since the middle of the twentieth century women have dominated the horse show circuit. While most jockeys are men, most exercise “boys” and many trainers and grooms now are women.

During my first ten years, I devoted much time to acquiring model horses, reading and collecting horse books, and designing and building my own model horse farm from cardboard. I read every book that had a horse, pony, or donkey on the cover, including the Black Stallion series, Brighty of the Grand Canyon, Misty of Chincoteague, the Flicka trilogy, The Horsemasters, Black Beauty, Smoky the Cowhorse, anything illustrated by the famous Paul Brown, and the greatest of them all, National Velvet, written at a higher level than most animal books. I also read dog and cat books, including The Cat Who Went to Heaven, The Call of the Wild, Lassie Come Home, and Navarre of the North while avoiding anything in which there were no animals. To this day I have never read a Hardy Boys or Nancy Drew mystery. English writers were my favorites because the human protagonist was likelier to be a girl. The beauty of National Velvet is that the hero is a fourteen-year-old who makes her own dream come true (she acquires a horse) and then goes on to become a champion (winning the world’s most grueling horse race, the Grand National). Although the premise is fantasy, the narrative is rich with realistic detail. It is still one of my favorite novels. Like many horse lovers, I wanted to be a veterinarian when I was young, until I found out that veterinarians’ schedules allow them little flexibility. I know several who own horses, but none ever has time to ride. Nor do they have time to write.

I was looking out the window at Xanadu and her foal grazing in the pasture and remembered the spring morning during my senior year in high school when I saw from a window a gray pony grazing in the backyard. In those days I thought of nothing but going to college, but years before I ever had my own horse, I imagined that one might appear on our lawn and that I could keep it. I knew who owned that pony; it had probably slipped through a break in a fence line and traveled about a mile during the night, grazing wherever it chose. We returned it to the owner. Now, watching my own horses, I realize that the dream, once so ephemeral, had become reality. My husband commented that the cardboard farm I constructed as a child bears an uncanny similarity to the place we now live.

Early on I chose to ride in the European style called “riding English”—using the saddle with pommel rather than horn—instead of the American style called “riding western,” which is somewhat of a misnomer, as the saddle was designed in Spain, taken to the New World by Spanish explorers, and redeveloped in its present form by Mexicans. My riding muscles have been trained by so many years in the English saddle that today I find western saddles difficult to use. I have attended only one rodeo in my life and amused my relatives by cheering for the bucking broncos and steers rather than the cowboys who were trying to ride them. I admire the reining, roping, and cutting that western riders do since these sports carry on the legacy of cattle ranching but am mystified by western-style classes in which people are judged in part on their fancy, silver-studded saddles, since no reasonable person uses these saddles for ordinary riding. I am also at a loss to explain why women western equestrians find it necessary to wear extreme amounts of makeup, since no one who rides ever stays clean.

From the first, I thought English style riding more elegant and enjoyable, with jumping the skill I most desired to learn. I did not like the artificial, excessive high stepping of Tennessee Walking Horses or five-gaited saddle horses created by weighing down their shoes or the necessity of cutting a nerve in the tail to force the hair to flow in waves. The original Tennessee Walkers were trained to do the “running walk,” and three- and five-gaited horses were taught the “slow gate,” or “single-foot,” in order to allow plantation overseers to travel long distances without tiring horse or rider. (The fifth gait, the rack, is the faster, more animated version of the slow gait.) No one would ever use these show horses now for such practical work. Jumping, on the other hand, evolved from cross-country riding, which in Europe necessitated sometimes leaping over fences built during the time of the Enclosure Acts and the transformation of crop land to sheep pasture. Thoroughbreds and warm-bloods are born jumpers, and I wanted to learn to ride in a way that matched their natural abilities.

My first horse was a chestnut American Saddlebred which I owned when I was in high school. Originally trained in five gaits, he was a rescue from an owner who had nearly starved him. He recovered and proved to be a good first horse as he was willing and even-tempered. He had been trained in dressage and sometimes broke into a highly collected canter, a dance in which he changed leads with each step. No one could help me with my equitation as there were no trainers or stables in the county, and certainly few riders interested in the English riding style. Everyone else rode western, and the 4-H clubs were exclusively western, so when I went to the fair I was able to show in only one class and required to ride near the rail (opposite the audience) during the parade because my saddle did not match the others. In most of the country, the 4-H helps young people focus on projects, socialize with like-minded people, and develop confidence. Another equine organization for youth, the Pony Club, is more challenging than 4-H, but it is also more expensive to join.

In the absence of any community, I rode alone near the farm where I boarded my horse, exploring the second-growth woods that covered the hillsides eastward to Cross Creek and Reed’s Mills. My horse and I followed a seldom-used gravel lane through woods to a creek bottom and up the other side among fields long abandoned and land that was restoring itself after strip mining. We spent hours every day in summer and weekends during other seasons in those woods and fields. That horse was unquestionably the best part of my adolescence, although he could not have known it.

During my college years and afterward, I took riding lessons sporadically. When I was in my midthirties, finishing a PhD program and in need of activity entirely different from scholarly research, I decided to fulfill my long-delayed dream and took lessons at a stable that specialized in dressage and jumping. “Dressage” is a French word that simply means “training,” but equine dressage has as its goal perfect communication between rider and horse. Developed from the training of war horses in the Middle Ages, in which a knight needed his horse to respond immediately to commands, dressage evolved to finely choreographed performance. The highest level includes the airs above the ground of the Austrian Lipizzaner and the Spanish Andalusian horses, but there are many levels for riders and horses less accomplished, including novice, intermediate, and advanced training classes. Although dressage may seem artificial, horses are not asked to do anything that they do not execute in the wild state, and riders learn to communicate with the horse through very subtle movements.

Jumping lessons included stadium courses constructed of rails, gates, and other hurdles set in an indoor or outdoor arena and cross-country courses in which more natural-looking obstacles, such as brush piles, coops, logs, and stone fences, are built in fields and woods. At hunter stables the object is not only getting over the jump but achieving regular stride and creating a perfect arc in midair. I appreciate the naturalness of combined training in which a good jump is one in which no rails are displaced and both horse and rider are together on the other side. Riding a horse over a jump inspires feelings of power, flight, and fearlessness. Even several strides away from the obstacle, the accomplished rider knows whether the jump will be successful. Perhaps pole-vaulters know something of the same thrill. Cyclists know the exhilaration of fast motion through space, but they do not know the exultation of galloping a horse over level or rolling terrain or the feeling of partnership and communication without language. I never pursued the more advanced levels of combined training because riding competitively never interested me as much as riding for fun, so I turned to foxhunting and trail riding. Although formal hunting requires specific attire, and there is certainly a good bit of clannishness among members of older, established clubs, fox hunters seem more genuinely interested in riding for the fun of it and are overall less snobbish than many competitive riders. Trail riding provides the opportunity to see different terrains from the back of a horse and to feel connected to the earth. There is no clannishness or snobbishness among trail riders; people help each other with difficult horses, and I can ride alone whenever I choose.

For eighteen years between high school and the end of graduate school I kept no horse until I bought Kestrel, a chestnut Quarter Horse–Thoroughbred mare, in 1987. She stood 15.3 hands (sixty-three inches at the withers) and had the long neck and rounded hind quarters of a good jumper. I changed her show name, Over the Rainbow, to The Windhover for the bird in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem by the same name. I used to think that having two names for a horse was superfluous but then realized that just as formal names and nicknames serve to identify us to strangers, acquaintances, and friends, so they do with horses to signify public and private identities.

Herd animals must have companions, however, and some horses refuse to eat if they cannot see another horse. In this way they are like people: even introverted and solitary ones usually need some company. Only once have I seen a horse willingly wander so far from the herd that it was unable to see the others: in 2001, climbing in Nepal above seventeen thousand feet, I glimpsed a lone gray horse of the sturdy variety cropping the sparse grass of the slope. Perhaps he was like those rare people who can be happy entirely alone, such as hermits or frontiersmen.

When I brought Kestrel to our place in Ashland County, she was alone. Turned out into the pasture, she ran the length of her eight-acre pasture, whinnying and working up a lathered sweat. She calmed down in time but spent several months visibly depressed. An acquaintance lent me Shio, a dark bay pony about twelve hands high, formerly a children’s hunter who had been without a companion for over a year. Shio was a contraction of his show name, Shy Boy. Newly introduced horses engage in a ritual of sniffing each other’s nostrils, stomping and squealing, turning their backs on each other, pinning their ears, and sometimes kicking. This behavior often precedes a period of running together in a field. To prevent horses from injuring themselves, people often stable new horses far from others, then gradually move them closer, and at last pasture them together. Since I was putting a mare and gelding together with no other horses, I let them go into the pasture after only one day of acquaintance. They bonded immediately. Frequently, when I took Colleen for her final walk of the evening, I saw Shio lying proprietarily in the doorway of the barn while Kestrel lay on folded legs inside.

Kestrel holds an important place in my heart because she was a good jumper and my first horse after adolescence. I took lessons, participated in shows, fox hunted, and rode trails with her. In all those years she ran away with me only once, on a cool day in late fall after she had been stabled for weeks due to bad weather. As she aged, I knew I needed to find another riding horse and bought Xanadu who had been trained in jumping and dressage. Xanadu gave me two foals, Grayfell and Lyric, and so at one time I had five horses in the barn. Gradually, however, the population changed. Shio developed Cushing’s disease and had to be put down at the age of twenty-eight. I sold both foals I had bred and raised. Grayfell eventually served the role of clinic horse in Maumee, while Lyric won ribbons as a combined training horse in northeastern Ohio. When Xanadu developed arthritis, I bought Montana, a large (16.5 hands, or nearly sixty-five inches at the withers), athletic, red dun Quarter Horse registered as a paint, to be my lesson horse and fox hunter. Bred in Bucyrus for western-style riding, he had the conformation and stride of a jumper and for a time had been shown in combined training. He proved to be the best jumper and lesson horse of my career and the one who enabled me to do what I most wanted to do—jump obstacles over four feet high in the hunt field. Several years later, I bought a small bay Quarter Horse and named him Dakota; he became my dream trail horse, willing to take me anywhere I asked him to, alone or in company. With his placid disposition, he has the best mind of any horse I have ever owned and has never run away with me. Demonstrably affectionate whenever I walk into the barn, he brushes my cheek gently with his soft nose. When his papers arrived, I realized that he had been bred near Bloomingdale in Jefferson County, where I grew up, so my last horse and I share an origin. Dakota and a borrowed companion I call Maverick, a small bay Thoroughbred retired from racing, are the only horses who now graze my pasture.

Horses in herds, like people in groups, form hierarchies. A mare usually leads, and in my barn that mare was Kestrel. In large horse operations, mares are usually separated from geldings, who will spar with each other if mares occupy the same pasture, but in smaller barns another routine is to pasture mares with one gelding. Stallions in the wild have been described as “herding” and “protecting” their mares or “harem,” but this is inaccurate, anthropocentric language. The stallion protects his breeding rights, but an alpha mare always leads whether at the front or from the middle of the herd. Montana dominated inside the barn while Kestrel dominated in the pasture, a direct reversal of the human tendency for the female to be more assertive in the house and the male in public. Researchers have identified seventeen different facial movements that horses use in order to communicate with each other—including opening eyes wide to show fear, raising the inner eyebrow to signal surprise, and pulling back the corners of lips to indicate greeting. They push down the corners of their lips and furrow their brows to express irritation and pin their ears to communicate irritation or anger. In an almost comical gesture thought to represent disgust, they raise their heads and point their upper lips. Stomping a hind leg warns others not to get too near; they indicate dissatisfaction with their riders’ signals by flagging their tails or shaking their heads. Young horses spar and play with each other in order to establish their own hierarchy within the larger herd, much as some adolescents dominate others through the strength of their personalities, but in the horse world the alpha mare always governs and sometimes settles disputes arising from the exuberance of youth. In human society, likes and dislikes, joy and anger are social constructs, and I suspect that much more of our behavior is socially controlled than we would like to think. While both social and herd animals form hierarchies, however, I see no evidence in equine herds of the kind of ostracism that people engage in nor the narcissism, egomania, and megalomania one finds in almost all groups of Homo sapiens, the supposedly “wise man.”

In natural horsemanship, the human being takes the place of the lead horse of the herd. Trainers stand in the middle of a round pen, working the animal at the trot or canter while watching for signs of submission—cocking an ear, chewing, flagging the tail, lowering the head—whereupon they look down and adopt a less assertive posture. The horse finally indicates its willingness to do the trainer’s bidding by walking toward the person, a motion called “join-up.” Repeated sessions are necessary, however, and neither imprinting nor natural horsemanship can substitute for long years of work. Training of horse and rider never really ends.

By August of his second year, Grayfell was executing a perfect collected trot on his own, demonstrating his potential as a dressage horse. One day after I worked with him on leading, right in front of me he performed a capriole, in which the horse leaps into the air and kicks while suspended above the ground. This movement of the advanced stages of dressage is executed by highly trained horses on command but is also performed naturally by young, untrained horses. In Grayfell’s case, the leap was intended to indicate his disdain for me. Foals are like children, and yearlings are like adolescents: they want to see how much they can get away with, but they still crave love and attention.

I weaned Grayfell in September because Xanadu was in foal after I bred her again to the same Connemara stallion. She did not understand that she needed all her strength for her new baby and wore a path along the fence trying to get to her firstborn. Shio at first served as a companion, but eventually Grayfell transferred his affection to Kestrel.

One day before my forty-eighth birthday at the end of May, Callahan’s Lyric was born in the early morning. He was coal black, so I knew he would turn dapple gray like his sire. I imprinted him only four times before he relaxed and worked with me, indicating that he would be more tractable than his brother. I cleaned out the straw and put it on the strawberry garden, all the time listening to the woodpeckers’ drumming, the rattle of the chipping sparrow, and the songs of robins and orioles.

As I led his mother out to the paddock, Lyric whinnied in his squeaky, high-pitched voice. When he stopped to look out over the fields, perhaps wondering at the vastness of the world he had just entered, his mother nickered to him to come to her. He bucked and kicked, shook his head, and then for the first time in his little life, he galloped toward her.